The news that the US government is going to pump $1 trillion into buying up banks' "toxic debts" sent the stock markets soaring. Once again attempts to halt economic meltdown involve spending astronomical amounts of public money to cover for the past actions of greedy bankers.

When Barack Obama announced George Mitchell as his "peace envoy" in the Middle East there was praise for his choice of the "peacebroker" of Northern Ireland (NI). Yet only two months later the peace was shattered when two British soldiers and then a police officer were killed by Republican groups.

Charity by numbers

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£57 million – Money raised on Comic Relief's Red Nose Day
£26.4 million – Estimated repayment of foreign debt by African states on the same day
£175 million – Total bonuses to be paid out at majority state-owned RBS bank in 2009 (having been cut from £1 billion)

In recent weeks police have been seen to arbitrarily stop and search young people outside the Taking Liberties exhibition at the British Library (slogan: "In some countries you wouldn't have the right to visit this exhibition about your rights").

"Shell is helping create viable and sustainable alternatives for both fuel and power through scientific and technology developments in such areas as wind, biomass, hydrogen and solar." So says the website for Shell, amid a flurry of other stories of how the gas company is saving the world.

While politicians clearly have no idea of how to solve the economic crisis unemployment continues to rise across Britain. But where is it having the most impact? Danny Dorling argues that it is the young – "Thatcher's grandchildren" – who will bear the brunt of the recession.

London Metropolitan University is facing massive funding cuts after an audit by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) discovered that university management had been submitting inaccurate data.

Chris Harman: In perspective: Panic in high places

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Twenty years ago, as the USSR showed signs of crisis, I would read some of the daily translations the BBC provided from from the Soviet press. They created the clear impression of rulers who were losing control of events and did not know what to do. Today I get the same feeling as I read the Finacial Times (FT).

As the protest movement in Pakistan scores a victory, the Afghanistan war threatens increasing instability along the countries' shared border. Geoff Brown assesses this key faultline of US imperialism.

Joseph Choonara spoke to acclaimed Marxist theoretician David Harvey about capitalism's current crisis and his online reading group of Karl Marx's Capital which shows the revival of interest in this work.

I would guess that most socialists are instinctively anti-violence. We hate almost all of its manifestations from war all the way through to bullying. Many of us came to socialist politics via anti-war movements or struggles against various forms of oppression.

Sixty years after its formation Nato continues to be an important tool of US imperialism. John Newsinger traces the organisation's history from its first meeting on 4 April 1949 to today's war in Afghanistan and its expansion into the countries of eastern Europe.

The Spirit Level is by any criterion a groundbreaking work and one that deserves the widest possible readership.
Its central argument is presented in an admirably clear and accessible way and backed up by an impressive body of empirical evidence. The book argues that what matters in determining not only the health and mortality of any society but also the prevalence of a host of other social problems, including mental illness, obesity and homicides, is less the overall wealth of that society but how that wealth is distributed or, in other words, the extent of inequality. It is this factor above all which provides us with a measure, or "spirit level", against which we can assess the overall health of any given society.

For Barack Obama the Iraq war was a "dumb" war fought for the wrong reasons and with the wrong methods. The Gamble – General Petraeus and the Untold Story of the American Surge in Iraq, 2006-2008, tells the inside story of how a group of "smart" generals developed a "new" strategy to replace the failing Bush doctrine of "shock and awe".

In 1992, as the former Yugoslavian Republic tore itself apart in a series of bloody ethnic conflicts, the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic put forward the following explanation for why Serbs, Croats and Muslims were killing each other: "Tito threw us together. We are like oil and water. While he shook us, we stayed together. Once we were left alone, we separated."

It is not the first time that Xiaolu Guo has used the idea of an "alien" as a metaphor. But this time, in UFO in Her Eyes, her second novel in English, it isn't about the alienation of a young female Chinese student finding love in England (as in her wittily written first novel in English, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers). It's about the alienation of an illiterate rural resident of a village called Silver Hill in Hunan province, set in 2012, four years after the Beijing Olympics.

Alastair Crooke is described on the back cover of his book as a former adviser to an EU diplomat, and the director of Conflicts Forum. You might assume he's a Guardian-reading NGO official.
But he is also a former MI6 agent. He previously lived in Dublin, Ireland, where he was the British government's chief contact with the IRA. After involvement in brokering the Good Friday agreement he moved to Jerusalem, where he was lead British negotiator with the Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas.

Just walking down the high street means being surrounded by images of bodies being used to sell everything from shaving gel to breakfast cereal. More often than not these bodies are airbrushed and altered so the women portrayed have inflated breasts, tiny waists, rounded bottoms and long legs while men are muscular with angular jaws.

The title's allusion to a famous poem about the exotic middle eastern city of Petra ("a rose-red city – half as old as time") hints at something more exotic than inner-city Hackney – though Hackney does possess a (dirty) rose-red former music hall, the Empire. There may even be an echo of Peter Sellers' travelogue parody, which invokes "a rose-red city half as gold as green" ("Golders Green").

Stella Duffy loves cities and loves London. One of her characters reflects on "how he never wants to live anywhere where they sell only one nationality of food, where the shopkeepers all have the same accent".

At a time of massive newsroom lay-offs and newspaper closures, any book that attempts to inspire renewed activism around and a transformation of the existing media system is both welcome and necessary.

Most people are familiar with the US experience of the Vietnam War – the brutalisation of the men who fought it, the resistance movements in universities and the work of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. Comparatively little is known about the experience of the war in Vietnam; the story from the other side, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese, has been virtually ignored.

China's Global Strategy comes at a time when the country is being seen as a growing power. Talk of China and the US coming into conflict in a battle of economic supremacy is becoming widespread. In her book Jenny Clegg argues that China holds the key to building a more peaceful and equal world.

The military theory of "rapid dominance" or, as it is more commonly known, "shock and awe", was deployed by the US military during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The theory is as simple as it is brutal.

Disclaimer – I've never previously much liked Gilad Atzmon's CDs. Live, he can be brilliant, with a bite and intensity that make him one of the best jazz artists working in Britain today. But I've rarely felt that he's managed to capture that on CD. This is very different, though.

Vampires are always a metaphor for something: capitalist exploitation (Karl Marx's Capital), drug abuse (The Addiction) or sexual awakening (Nosferatu, Buffy the Vampire Slayer). In this Swedish horror film, adapted from the novel of the same name, vampirism symbolises the loss of childhood innocence.

Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen) is the mother of seven and wife of an abusive drunk, Sigge (Mikael Persbrandt). He beats her and their children whenever he's had a drink too many, which is quite often.